The obvious conclusion a thinking person can make is chilling in its stark simplicity: the siloviki bureaucracy can do anything. There is no right of private property ownership. A person who collides with “the system” has no rights whatsoever.
Even though they are enshrined in the law, rights are not protected by the courts. Because the courts are either also afraid, or are themselves a part of “the system.” Should it come as a surprise to anyone then that thinking people do not aspire to self-realization here, in Russia?…
Hope—the main engine of big reforms and transformations, the guarantor of their success. If hope fades, if it comes to be supplanted by profound disillusionment, who and what will be able to lead our Russia out of the new stagnation?
I will not be exaggerating if I say that millions of eyes throughout all of Russia and throughout the whole world are watching for the outcome of this trial. They are watching with the hope that Russia will after all become a country of freedom and of the law, where the law will be above the bureaucratic official.
Where supporting opposition parties will cease being a cause for reprisals.
Where the special services will protect the people and the law, and not the bureaucracy from the people and the law.
Where human rights will no longer depend on the mood of the tsar. Good or evil.
Where, on the contrary, the power will truly be dependent on the citizens, and the court-only on law and God. Call this conscience, if you prefer.
I believe this is how it will be.
I am not at all an ideal person, but I am a person with an idea. For me, as for anybody, it is hard to live in jail, and I do not want to die there.
But if I have to, I will not hesitate. The things I believe in are worth dying for. I think I have proven this….
Everybody understands that your verdict in this case—whatever it will be—is going to become part of the history of Russia. Furthermore, it is going to form it for the future generation. All the names—those of the prosecutors, and of the judges—will remain in history, just like they have remained in history after the infamous Soviet trials.
Your Honor, I can imagine perfectly well that this must not be very easy at all for you-perhaps even frightening—and I wish you courage!
The words and dreams of a great man, regardless of his past sins or future activities. Five weeks later the judge extended the sentences of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev to 2017, which was later reduced to 2016 and then to 2014 on appeal. But of course Putin had yet more tricks up his sleeve.
Three years later Putin surprised everyone, including Khodorkovsky, by announcing he would release him, which he did on December 20, 2013. It was likely due to a combination of German pressure—Khodorkovsky thanked former German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher for helping get him released—and Putin’s desire to tidy up loose ends before the Winter Olympics began in Sochi in February 2014. Khodorkovsky was drawing too much attention, having been declared a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, and the Olympic spotlight would have found him a tempting subject. It was also an opportunity for Putin to play his favorite role of the “good tsar,” showing mercy to a fallen foe and a chance to get something in exchange for the small cost of releasing him eleven months early. It also avoided the hassle of starting a third trial that would have to have escalated to crimes no less than murder to justify keeping Khodorkovsky imprisoned.
Khodorkovsky left for Germany on the day of his release to visit his ailing mother. He kept a fairly low profile upon his release, but soon he began to speak against the Putin regime and has reopened his Open Russia program.
There is no epilogue to Khodorkovsky’s story yet. As with so many Russian stories it cannot be written as long as Putin is still in power. As for Khodorkovsky’s ambitions, when I spoke with him not long after his release he said to me, quietly but confidently, “If I were Putin, I wouldn’t have let me go.”
OFF THE BOARD, INTO THE FIRE
There’s a very long list of things my hardline Soviet Communist grandfather would never have believed would happen in my lifetime, and my becoming the world chess champion doesn’t even make the top ten. Giving a speech on the importance of the “American values” of capitalism and liberty to a black-tie audience in Manhattan would be high on the list. So would my wearing a borrowed cowboy hat in Wyoming after lecturing there on the threat of Putin’s Russia.
The likely number one, however, took place on August 17, 2012, at a Moscow courthouse. Not even inside the courthouse, but outside of it. That was the day I was arrested and beaten by the police while protesting the sentencing of Pussy Riot, three members of the all-girl punk group that had been convicted for filming an anti-Putin protest inside a Moscow church. Their sentencing took place in the same Khamovnichesky court that had held Mikhail Khodorkovsky two years earlier. Unable to enter through the crowds, I was standing on the sidewalk outside speaking calmly with a few journalists when the police came over and literally carried me away.
By law, at least in theory, the police must inform you why you are being arrested. There were plenty of witnesses and even videos of my abduction to show that this never occurred. Instead, they show me, legs in the air, shouting, “What am I being charged with? What are the charges?” (As well as a few other words I would not want to explain to my young daughter.) They tossed me into the waiting police van and closed the door. But they didn’t lock it.
In a move I would quickly have reason to regret, I opened the door and demanded again to know what I was being charged with. My words were cut off as I half fell and was half pulled into the crowd of police outside the van. My arms were twisted and several blows came down on my head and body before they lifted me back into the van and shoved me to the rear. A Dutch photographer was quick enough to get a shot of me pinned against the van’s back wall by two cops, one bending my arm back and the other pressing against my throat.
I’m not objective about the events of that day, but I don’t think that an unarmed chess player nearing his fiftieth birthday presented such a terrible danger to an army of riot police. But while I was bruised for quite a while, I was lucky not to suffer any permanent injuries. My spirits were good enough that I could laugh when the police issued a statement that they were considering filing additional charges against me for biting one of the officers on the finger during their assault. Well, I am by no means a vegetarian, though as I turned fifty a few years ago I have had to cut back on red meat on my doctor’s advice. But I can say with certainty that were I to acquire a taste for human flesh, the way Bengal tigers are said to do, I would never bite anyone under the rank of general.
Knowing that witnesses and all the evidence in the world wouldn’t matter inside a Moscow courtroom, my friends and I scrambled to put together as many photos, videos, and testimonies as we could and publish them widely before my trial. Our hope was that if it was totally obvious to the entire world that I had violated no laws, it would be too embarrassing for the government to convict me on the charge of “participating in an unsanctioned protest.” That was 2012, when it was still possible to imagine the Putin government being embarrassed by anything.
I am quick to admit that in this I am very lucky to have a certain amount of protection because of my famous name. The news picked up the story and footage of my arrest and beating in minutes. Thanks to the power of social media, thousands of people could help my friends and me look through hundreds of photos and videos to prove that the officer who was going to charge me with assault had sustained the cut on his finger before my arrest. Unlike most Russians who are abused the way I was, or worse, I had the knowledge and resources to mount a defense campaign.